Sunday, February 18, 2007

Musings.

So you may recall something about some mystery good news! Well I can not contain myself anymore. So here it is! The revealing of the good news!

I got FREE TICKETS to the Miami Boat Show. Yes, while all the other people suckers had to pay to get in, I got in for free. I have the hook up. I got in last year for free too. When I say I have many minions I mean it. My operatives are everywhere, and are always on the lookout for free stuff I may want. Which is almost anything. If it is free, it is for me.

See how things work out? I wanted to go to the boat show for free, and I went to the boat show for free.

In totally unrelated news, do you brew your own beer at home? Well, do you? Cause the Boston Beer Company is sponsoring a homebrew contest! So if you are a homebrewer, enter your best brew. You may just win one of many fabulous prizes. Samuel Adams himself may even make a batch of your beer and distribute it! How cool is that? If my homebrewing stuff were not put away somewhere in storage I would enter this contest. I need to dig my stuff up and start brewing again. It is a lot of fun. It is a lot like cooking, only it takes several weeks and it gets you drunk. But it rules to have your friends come to your house and hang out drinking beer. You usually make 5 gallon batches at a time, so there is usually enough. That is FIFTY TWO 12 ounce bottles. If your buddies and yourself are heavy hitters you can make multiple batches.

Now for a little about today's sea shanty. The Sailor's Hornpipe. The hornpipe is a simple British woodwind musical instrument, consisting of a single reed and an animal horn. Think of a very primitive clarinet. Or a recorder with a real reed. Something like that.

Anyway, it was perfect for a life at sea. No metal parts to corrode. Simple to play. And so on.

There was a dance that went along with this tune. But sailors did not dance to this tune while ashore, so the exact steps seem to be lost to history. But the word on the streets is that sailors would preform dance moves to mimic the daily routine of a life at sea. Dance steps included "hoisting the sail", "swabbing the deck", "weighing the anchor", "drinking the daily ration of grog", and so on.

Oh another thing. For hundreds of years the British Royal Navy issued a daily ration of rum to all sailors. And in a strange coincidence the British were a mighty naval power for hundreds of years. They made the sea their bitch after Sir Francis Drake kicked the shit out of the Spanish Armada in 1588.

However, in 1970 the Royal Navy stopped the daily ration of rum. It was a sad day. Hundreds of years of naval tradition - gone forever. Silly Limeys.

Speaking of Limeys, we all know that means "the British". But do you know how this term came to be? Well I happen to know. I do not know why I know, I just do.

Sailors were prone to get scurvy. This is a condition caused by a lack of vitamin C. It causes your teeth to fall out, skin legions, and bloody mucus membranes. Your body can not produce collagen, so your skin looses its elastic properties and is prone to simply fall apart. So the British Royal Navy provided each sailor a daily ration of limes or lime juice. If I were British, I would not consider being called a "Limey" to be an insult. The term hearkens back to a day when the sun never set on the Empire.

19 Comments:

Wow, just a couple posts back, looks like you have some wild anons. I would never do that but those 'not anons' really have your back. Do you typically have that many anons talking smack?

Speaking of diarrhea since easter, I would enter the homebrew contest but I wonder how a brewer would place if their submission came with a case of botulism? I live here in the NW, land of a million brewery's and some fabulous ER docs.

and speaking of docs or docks as it may be, Have you seen Horatio Hornblower? Ioan Gruffudd's A&E version is my favorite.

The anons are off the chain. But it is OK - I allow anonymous comments because I am a comment whore. I feed on comments. So I want to make it very easy for anyone to leave them. Also, and this may be a shock, I am not a giant green iguana who can type. So really - everything here is anonymous. Except for those who know who I am.

I never got the squirts from my homebrew. Of course, it was never that great either. This is one reason I quit brewing - I could get better beer for less money at the local brew pub. You all in the NW have it made - truly the BEST beer in America can be found there.

Capitalist? I did not PAY for the boat show! I think that the show should be free for everyone. Mostly for me. Life on a boat would be great. As long as I had access to shore power to run the AC. And as long as there are no hurricanes. And no wake in the harbor. And no sea gulls crapping all over my house.

"Also, and this may be a shock, I am not a giant green iguana who can type."What?? The internet LIED to me? I feel so cheated!

Mm, home-brewed beer is fun. My friend managed to fill 78 bottles with his latch batch. The only problem was that he had no empty bottles to put the beer in, so he eventually had to buy full beer bottles and drink/dump them before we could taste it!

Haven't home-brewed for a while. Been thinking about doing some again, but it wouldn't win any contest. I found a bunch of those cool bottles at work with the ceramic tops on wire things. They seal with rubber rings, and actually hold a pint.We used to listen to Horatio Hornblower on the radio. Have you seen "Captain and Commander" ?

Caiman - no VIP parking. I had to fork over 10 beans for that. But it came with a FREE shuttle bus ride to the convention center. And the parking was at the American Airlines arena - so the vehicle was out of the sun and stuff. The 10 beans was worth it.

Badoozie - Tickets. Yes. The boat show is serious business so I went with my dad. Chicks always want to waste too much time looking at the crap unrelated to boats - like the glass trinkets and the pelican paintings. They want nothing to do with the important stuff like the engine displays, the electronics booth, and the Carib Beer scantly clad chicks handing out free stuff.

In that case, you are invited to next year's boat show. Ill get you a free ticket, if my connections hold up. I like looking at the real pelican that the pelican rescue people bring in to educate the public about pelican related issues however.

Maybe we can pull some sort of scam on the yacht people. I am thinking here. One of us can pretend to have a lot of money. I can be like "OHHH look at that yacht! Buy that one for me" and you can be like "but I just got your ass a Bently last week!" and I can be like "yea, but the Bently can not float! Don't you remember that I got drunk and drove it in the lake?" and you can say "you fucking idiot! You never told me that! Now I suppose you want another one!" and Ill say "hell yea I want another one! The old one stinks like dead bass already. And by the way I gave one of your checks to the Mako dealer to buy a 28 footer. You need to buy me a V-10 dualie diesel truck now so I can tow the thing. The next Bently I need does not have a class IV hitch."

And so on. Then the yacht sales dude will let us on board the fancy boats cause he thinks he might get a sale out of it. We can scam all the free crap they give to people they think can afford a few million for a boat.

i think the yacht sales guy would let us on to get away from our fat mouths.

or he would give it to us in order to get us out of there because then i would say "yeah and if you ask me again, i'll shoot you with my gun that has a silencer in it, and then you would be like "oh really? bring it woman!" and i would say "ok, i'll bring that and more" and you'll be like "ok, i'm ready to die again today forever", and and and